Neighbours

We have been living in our house for nine years now. It's on a main road and lacks that sense of community spirit that one tends to find in the quieter back streets. Across the road from us are several blocks of flats and units, many of them rental properties so there is a high turn-over of residents. Immediately to our East is a single story, ugly, brown brick, nouveau-wog house. The shutters are almost always down. And on the Western side is a large, two-story, brown brick, ugly nouveau-wog establishment; so large that our guests to mistake it for a block of flats.

to our East

to our West

When I say large, I mean enormous - the monstrosity fills most of the block. It's windows overlook our driveway and have a view straight into our bedrooms. At the front, the house has 'classy' white balustrading around the balcony and a driveway paved with large orange tiles. Not pretty but fortunately we usually can't see too many tiles as they are covered by the fleet of cars that belong to the household. A household of 3 people! There's the dad 'G', his wife 'C' and their adult son 'M' who really ought to have flown the family nest while he was still in his early thirties. They are frequently visited by their adult daughter who has married and spawned and now lives around the corner.

I first met G soon after we had moved in. A friendly-enough chat over the fence. This happened a few more times, and sometimes just a quick wave hello as we passed in the street. But things started to go a little bit wrong. One day I came outside to find G up a ladder painting the balcony of his house, on a ladder which had it's base in our driveway. He was positioned right over our car. Luckily no paint had dripped on it yet. I told him that he had no right to come onto our property, especially without asking first and told him to leave. Another time, I came home to find him in our driveway, digging around in the garden bed along the fence line - apparently the dirt from our garden bed was coming under a gap in the fence and he was trying to plug the gap or something. Again I told him not to take the liberty of coming onto our property. After this incident, we put a padlock on our gate.

Then we started renovating our place. First step was the garage which we extended to create room for DeepSpice's planned woodworking workshop. The original garage had an annoying 30cm gap between the fence line and the side of the existing garage. On his side of the fence, G had years of hoarded crap piled up - old timbers and sheets of corrogated iron, etc., high enough to be covering the gutters of our garage, which were now rusted out as a result. He seemed annoyed at having to move it when we started building.

We were told by Council that our new garage wall extension would either have to be right on the fence line or we would have to leave a 1 metre gap between the wall and the fence. We chose to build on the fence line (our yard is not big enough to allow the luxury of a one metre gap). This seemed to annoy G and his son, and from this point, he started making our lives difficult. Our building works were held up while we attempted to discuss the issue with G. Then G would not allow the builder to remove the fence so he could access our garage from the other side of the fence during the building works. So our builder had to do everything over the garage roof. Once the building was finished, there was just a small gap between the fence and the garage wall of about 10 cm. A week later we discovered that G had pulled down the fence and claimed this 10cm gap for himself. He also took the liberty of painting our Colourbond downpipe and guttering in a horrible shade of brown to match his house.

Several more annoyances have occurred since. For example:

• Visitors to G's house frequently park in the driveway blocking the footpath, which apart from being illegal, is simply annoying. When I am out with Thumper in the pram, I am forced to walk on the busy main road, around the offending car. Despite asking the drivers of these vehicles not to block the footpath, they keep doing, because they are too lazy to park in front of a neighbouring house and walk 20 metres along the footpath. 
• G places his rubbish bins in the middle of our shared driveway crossover, so that once the truck empties them, they end up in the middle of our driveway, blocking the way if we need to drive our car out. 
• Cigarette butts end up in our driveway, a long way back from the road. So I have my suspicions that they throw them over our fence. 

The way things are now... we don't like 'em but mostly we just ignore them and can speak civilly if the need arises. So DeepSpice and I were very puzzled a few days ago when a letter arrived from the Department of Justice (DoJ) inviting us to a mediation session at the Dispute Settlement Centre regarding 'an issue of concern' with a 'Mr D'. There was no mention of what the issue of concern was and we had no idea who this 'Mr D.' was. I looked the name up in the telephone directory and discovered that it was in fact G, our neighbour. And finally after two days of telephoning the DoJ, DeepSpice finally got hold of a real, live human being who could tell us what was going on. Apparently G has a problem with the pittosporum trees we have planted in the garden bed along the fenceline! He wants us to cut them back, or more likely he probably wants us to cut them down and concrete over the entire area. We could not believe he would go to the DoJ rather than just talk to us! DeepSpice does recall G having asked on two previous occasions for us to cut back the trees branches that extended over his fence line. We told G that if he wants to prune the trees he can (legally he has the right to do so as long as he does not damage or kill the trees). 

So that is the f-wit who lives to our West. 

Turns out, we have one on our East as well. An Italian family of nona, mother, father and their two kids have lived there for about 4 years now. I have often spoken to C, the nona, as she has seen me outside with my babies (when Thumper and BallFiend were still babies), and everyone knows that old Italian women love babies! However, I have barely laid eyes on the rest of the family. The household is a bit strange too, they seem to own a taxi business and there are always taxis arriving, getting cleaned and then leaving again. 

The man also has an expensive hobby of restoring vintage cars, and he likes to take them for a drive now and then. That is fine, except that he warms up the engine in his driveway, in a spot that is about 2 metres from our lounge room window. Our house is an old weatherboard, not particularly well-sealed. So all the smelly exhaust fumes find their way in through the gaps, and the noise of the engine resonates throughout the house. Very unpleasant and not helpful when trying to settle a screaming baby. So a few years ago, when BallFiend was a baby, DeepSpice went around and politely asked if he could please warm up the engine out in the street. The man begrudgingly complied and has mostly done so ever since. 

Over the past year or so I haven't seen the kids or their mother around, so I suspect they might have separated and the mother and kids have moved out. After recent issues we have had with father, I would not be surprised. A few weeks ago, at about 10 pm, a noisy power tool started up, a sander or something, in the garage at the back of their property. By 11.30 pm when we were definitely ready for bed, it was still going. DeepSpice attempted to go around and ask the neighbour to be quiet, but couldn't gain access - ringing the doorbell was unlikely to be heard by the man all the way down in his shed and the driveway gate was locked. So we put up with it and DeepSpice went around to speak to him the next day.

This guy had a serious chip on his shoulder! He carried on about 'you and your perfect life' and that if he was doing something illegal (which he in fact was) we should call the cops. We would never consider bothering the cops with something like this, especially if we had not first tried to speak with the neighbour. After all, for all we knew, he may not have been aware that he was bothering us. Anyway, DeepSpice convinced him to stop the noise by 10.30 pm (which is 2.5 hours later than EPA noise rules allow for).

A week or so later, we received a scrawled note in our letterbox:

  

So now it turns out we also have a f-wit who lives to our East. 

I have been talking to DeepSpice about moving house on and off for the past year or two. This really makes me want to move sooner rather than later!

PS. Sorry for the very long post (rant), but I feel marginally better now.

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